Kao received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of London in 1957. That same year he went to work for Standard Telephones and Cables, a British subsidiary of the American telecommunications company ITT. In 1960 he transferred to ITT’s Standard Telecommunication Laboratories in Harlow, England. Kao received a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of London in 1965. In 1966 he and British engineer George Hockham proposed that fibres made of ultra-pure glass could transmit light for distances of kilometres without a total loss of signal. In 1970 the first practical fibre-optic cable was successfully produced, and by the end of the 20th century much of the world’s telecommunications was travelling through fibre-optic cable.

In 1970 Kao left ITT to spend four years at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. In 1974 he rejoined ITT as chief scientist of its electro-optical products division in Roanoke, Virginia. He later became ITT’s director of engineering in that division, and from 1983 to 1987 he was executive scientist and director of research at the ITT Advanced Tech Center in Shelton, Connecticut. From 1987 to 1996 he was vice-chancellor and president at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Kao then became chairman and chief executive officer (1996–2001) of Transtech, a Hong Kong fibre-optic company, and in 2000 he became chairman and chief executive officer of ITX Services, a technology transfer company.

Kao was diagnosed with Alzheimer disease, a degenerative brain disorder, in 2004. He and his wife, Gwen Kao, founded the Charles K. Kao Foundation for Alzheimer’s Disease Limited in 2010 to promote awareness about and care for those with the disease in Hong Kong.

Learn More in these related articles:

...fibres of core/cladding design were introduced in the early 1950s, the presence of impurities restricted their employment to the short lengths sufficient for endoscopy. In 1966, electrical engineers Charles Kao and George Hockham, working in England, suggested using fibres for telecommunication, and within two decades silica glass fibres were being produced with sufficient purity that infrared...

any of the prizes (five in number until 1969, when a sixth was added) that are awarded annually from a fund bequeathed for that purpose by the Swedish inventor and industrialist Alfred Bernhard Nobel. The Nobel Prizes are widely regarded as the most prestigious awards given for intellectual...

electromagnetic radiation that can be detected by the human eye. Electromagnetic radiation occurs over an extremely wide range of wavelengths, from gamma rays with wavelengths less than about 1 × 10 −11 metre to radio waves measured in metres. Within that broad spectrum...